designing processes to develop and act on creative ideas

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Inspired by my friend Siri’s very excellent idea of posting an idea-a-day to her tumblr blog on the future of banking, I’ve decided to just go ahead and start posting up the random crazy ideas I have while working on this project, even though I’m still analyzing my data and haven’t really reached full-on concepting and ideation yet. The motivation behind this will be just to have a visual catalogue somewhere of all the ideas I’ve been having, and to come back and evaluate / tweak them later on when it comes time to start thinking of design solutions.

So without further ado, here’s the first one: IDEA GARDEN

What if… there was some kind of physical artifact that could track our ideas and project? Work on them and the idea flourishes, healthy and full of life. Neglect it and it begins to atrophy. New seedlings appear when you have a new idea, or when a current project begets a spin-off project.

One question though: is this an appropriate metaphor for how ideas work though? That if you neglect them long enough they will begin to dwindle away in life? Perhaps not?

The idea of an Idea Garden is based off of another idea I’ve been playing around with for a while (below), that of idea as something that lives and dies. In one of my classes, we had to practice creating various diagrammatic representations, so for one depicting “Metaphor” I tried to flesh out a bit more what “The Life and Death of an Idea” might look like. But again, maybe this is not the most appropriate metaphor for ideas. What about ideas that lie “dormant” for many, many years, and become a great creative work later on?

This also brings me to a question that I need to end up answering for myself at some point: what’s the difference between an idea and a project? What is an idea anyway?

Real-World Creativity

Welcome to my thesis blog! I'm Priscilla, and I'm writing this thesis for my Masters degree in Interaction Design, but more importantly, to satisfy this curiosity I've had for a few years now to learn about how creativity really works, and of course, to design something that can support people being creative. This project should last one year, from Spring 2012 - Spring 2013. Feel free to contact me if you have any comments / feedback at priscilm [at symbol] andrew.cmu.edu.